Has MyVLE's Moroccan founder learned enough from two failures to finally achieve success?

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MyVLE is without a doubt one of the most hotly anticipated
startups from Morocco. With its Moroccan and U.S.-based A-team, a
well-designed product, and what seems like an eager market, the
startup could become the success story Morocco has been waiting
for.

MyVLE (whose name
stands for My Virtual Learning Environment) is an online learning
platform aimed at small to medium-size schools. Having used
BlackBoard, the upscale market leader, back when I was in
university, I was expecting a rather dull demo. But I was wrong:
MyVLE is so simple and easy to use that I honestly wanted to go
back to school just so I could use it.

Serial entrepreneur Kamal Bouskri shared his story and what he’s
learned on his entrepreneurial journey.

Two failures, one entrepreneur

Freshly graduated from university the U.S., Bouskri headed back
to Marrakech to turn the family riad (traditional Moroccan
guesthouse) into a successful luxury hotel.

Once settled, Bouskri decided to launch a startup. In two years,
he launched and called a failure two companies, which he said told
him a lot on web entrepreneurship.

The first one, International Hoteliers Club, an online club
through which hospitality professionals could swap hotel nights and
travel for free, failed due to the entrepreneur’s sheer exhaustion
after having overextended himself. Bouskri’s second startup
Easyproof, a service that
facilitated remote work between designers and developers, failed
due to its lack of financial potential.

But these two experiences weren’t a waste of time. Here’s what
he learned from them:

Build your product first. Bouskri wanted users
to pay for access to International Hoteliers Club from day one; he
learned the hard way that people want proof that the service is up
and running before paying for it.

Surround yourself with cofounders to share the
workload, augment the company’s skillset and most importantly,
cheer you up and motivate you.

Pace yourself. Three months after launching,
the entrepreneur knew how he should pivot International Hoteliers
Club, but was too exhausted to do so.

Really study the market. The young father
realized once Easyproof launched that the competition was too far
ahead, and it would have been too costly to catch up.

Pay attention to the acquisition cost before
starting. Bouskri realized with Easyproof that a niche B2B market
means expensive acquisition costs that would kill all financial
potential.

For his next project, he looked for a crisis-proof market big
enough to offer real growth potential, and a product that doesn’t
require a critical mass. He opted for e-learning, and decided to
develop a Learning Management System (LMS), to challenge upscale
competitor Blackboard.

An A-team

This time around, Bouskri prioritized gathering a quality team.
“Without an A-team, the chance of succeeding would have
been really small,” he insists. He got Zakaria Mahboubi
for the finance side of things, and Hamza Aboulfeth for the tech
side. Aboulfeth already knows a thing or two about building a
successful company: at age 15, he launched the web hosting service
Genious,
dropping out of school at age 21 to work
full time on his company, which turned into an early Moroccan
success story.

Because he lacked market expertise and was entering a
competitive market, he also decided to get experts to help define
his product early on, so as to avoid “falling in love” with an
inadequate product. Because his Moroccan address lacked
international credibility, he looked for international
experts.

On the strength of his vision, he convinced Alan Daly, Chair of
the Education Studies department at University of California at San
Diego, who he met at his riad, then Alan Guinn, Dean of
Graduate Studies at Rushmore University, Tennessee, and an
entrepreneurship consultant, to join him as a partner/advisors in
exchange for some equity. “I’d rather have 30% [of a successful
startup] than 100% of nothing,” he said.

Five month later, the team is ready to work a product.

One problem, one solution

When trying to understand why small to medium size schools and
universities were reluctant to engage with e-learning products, the
team discovered that they were intimidated with the price and
corporate identity of big players like BlackBoard. They decided to
create a more accessible product.

To be able to offer affordable prices, the team worked for two
years on creating a service so simple to use that schools wouldn’t
need the MyVLE team to set it up or train users, allowing MyVLE to
save on client support.

To make it simple – and again, to save money – MyVLE chose to
use Google’s free cloud service, including video upload, chat, and
text-processing functions, rather than build and host their
own.

As for client acquisition, it will be through independent
partner VP.

A simple service

Teachers can adopt MyVLE at their own pace, trying out each of
the following functionalities when feel ready. They can:

Post study materials;

Open discussion boards where students can post questions to
their classmates, their teacher, or even guest speakers;

Post quizzes with automated correction, or essay
questions.

In order to make teachers lives easier, each student has their
own profile with a picture and their record, and teachers can get
statistics on their classes' performance.

The service is currently available in English, French, and soon
Arabic, with Africa and the Arab world in mind.

Aline is startup storyteller and journalist. Previously she was Wamda's French editor and an entrepreneur, opening The Blue House residence for international startups in a Moroccan surf town. You can follow her on Twitter @YallahAline.